


see me now

by pencilledhearts



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Light Angst, Post-Season/Series 02, Steve Harrington Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:15:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23825905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pencilledhearts/pseuds/pencilledhearts
Summary: “Why are you here, Nance?” he asks.“Dustin’s worried,” she says. “He says that you’ve been really quiet. That you don’t do anything apart from drive the kids around. Jonathon overheard someone talking in the locker room… they saw you crying, in the gym after hours.”“Well shit,” Steve says.After they close the gate, Steve struggles to cope.
Kudos: 63





	see me now

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to go for a more angsty Steve in the aftermath of season 2. I think that with every thing that happened - losing Nancy to Jonathon, having to go back to school with Billy - he'd definitely have reason to be a bitter, at least for a short while before working through some feelings. Enjoy :)

It’s Wednesday lunch time when Nancy decides to corner him.

Steve’s eating lunch on the hood of his car, by himself (like he usually is these days), the stubs of three burnt out cigarettes by his foot. The air is cool and crisp, the threat of snow hanging around like it has for the past week, and the tips of his fingers are slightly numb.

He spots her as she stands at the edge of the car park, her head turning as she looks for something. It only takes her a moment to see him, her gaze locking on, and then she’s headed his way.

“Fuck,” he breathes. Takes out another cigarette because, boy, he’s gonna need it.

“Steve,” Nancy says, arriving just as he’s finished lighting it. “Hey.”

Her cheeks are rosy red – she obviously checked the bleachers first – and she’s wearing the skirt that she’d worn on their first date. It’s a pastel blue and a shape that doesn’t do too much for her figure but it’s somehow _her_ , so like the way that she used to be before the gate, the demogorgon, before Barb, that the air is knocked out of him.

“Nance,” he says finally.

Nancy looks at him searchingly. “Your face has healed nicely,” she offers.

Steve hmms, can’t help looking away. It’s true that the bruises have mostly faded by now, but his right eye is still more bloodshot than it should be. There’s still a raised cut on his scalp.

“Jonathon said that you quit basketball.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I did.”

Not like he had much choice. The doctors had told him to stay away from violent sports, something to do with two serious head injuries in less than twelve months, and when Billy Hargrove is on your team, violence is almost guaranteed.

Nancy makes a sound, like she’s frustrated at his lack of words. Steve can’t help but quirk a smile as he flicks ash from the end of his smoke.

“Why are you here, Nance?” he asks.

“Dustin’s worried,” she says. “He says that you’ve been really quiet. That you don’t _do_ anything apart from drive the kids around. Jonathon overheard someone talking in the locker room… they saw you crying, in the gym after hours.”

“Well shit,” Steve says. Doesn’t know what to say, because what can he say?

He and Nance… they’ve never been good at talking. That was their whole problem, wasn’t it? They’ve never been able to understand each other, not truly.

And some things, it’s harder to say.

For everyone else, when the gate closed, they had each other. They had their families and friends. They could go to sleep with security in the knowledge that it was over.

For Steve, however, it’s a different story. His family aren’t in the know – and even if they were, he’s not sure that would persuade them to come home for long enough to have a conversation about it. His only friends – well, Tommy and Carol hate him now and he’s not too keen on them anymore, either. And as a friend, confidante, whatever, Nancy’s not exactly on the cards.

And how can he explain that for him, the real monsters weren’t the monsters that they trapped behind a locked door? That the real monster was the boy who looked him in the eyes as he swung his fists at his head, as he destroyed any hope he had of a scholarship, of finishing school with decent grades, of having a restful night of sleep ever again?

Because Billy Hargrove wasn’t a monster. Billy Hargrove can’t be killed with a baseball bat.

The others – maybe they deal with monsters in their dreams, now. But Steve has to get up every day and drive to class and look his monster in the eye as it makes joke with his childhood best friend.

When they go home at night, they can trust in the fact that there are other people around who will hear them if they scream.

Steve can look out of his bedroom window and see the grave of Barbara Holland glistening in the moonlight, where she disappeared without a sound or trace and hear the weight of a long empty house.

And if he looks too closely at Nancy’s face, he can see the steel in her eyes the night that she pointed a gun at his face and told him to leave, and the way his stomach had twisted as he thought, he truly thought that she would shoot him.

So sure, sometimes he sits and cries until there’s nothing left to give and the shaking in his shoulders and stomach make his muscles ache. Sometimes he finds his dad’s whisky and takes it up to his room, swigging it from the bottle as he huddles under the sheets in his bed with the nail bat at his feet. And sometimes he sits and thinks about where his life has gone so off track. Whether that’s in the gym, looking at the basketball court he used to own, or in the backyard with his feet in the pool where a girl died is no one else’s business really.

“Steve,” Nancy says, stamping her foot – in cold or irritation, he doesn’t know. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

He shrugs again. “M’okay, Nance. People talk too much.”

“That’s not- _Steve_. We’re worried about you.”

“Life goes on, y’know? What’s the point in focusing on it?”

“What’s the-” Nancy shakes her head, curls bouncing. Her hair’s shorter now. She got it cut the day after they closed the gate, like the whole cliché of reinventing yourself after a breakup was hers to claim. “You can’t just pretend that it didn’t happen! This isn’t like last time, we can’t just not talk about it, we have to-”

Steve finishes his cigarette, grinds it with his foot. Lights a new one without even thinking, watching Nancy’s desperate eyes as they follow his movement. “Yeah, it’s nothing like last year,” he says breezily. “I was in the loop for the beginning, wasn’t I. And there was no reason to worry about you and Jonathon and your-” he waves a hand in the air “-your thing, and how closer you were getting. And there were no fights, no demo-things running about, no secrets. No, you’re right Nancy, this is nothing last year.”

Nancy’s eyes fill with tears and there’s a part of himself that crumples a little. The bit that’s still in love with her, even now, or maybe the bit that’s just her friend, the part that’s a decent human being, turns in his stomach. Once, he’d promised himself to never be the person who made her cry.

“Steve,” she says, her voice breaking a little. “Please. Can’t we be mature about this? You said it was okay.”

Sure. It was, in a way. She likes Jonathon. Loves him even, maybe. And the kicker is that she has done ever since the incident last year and it _kills_ him because they’d had a whole year together, a whole year where he’d thought he was getting better, that things were good, that there was a future, and it had all been torn down in one night because she’d been pretending the entire time.

So, it’s not okay at all and never was but kicking up a fuss wouldn’t have solved anything and at the end of the day, he wants her to be happy.

She is happier now. He knows that.

“It is okay,” he says, his voice softening. “You look good together.” He looks out into the distance, over the car park and towards the school playing fields. “But you need to give me time- you need to let _me_ be okay, Nance. What happened that night… just give me some time.”

Unexpectedly, Nancy darts forwards and hugs him. Her hands slide around his middle like they have a thousand times before and in pure muscle memory, he draws her close, breathes in the smell of her hair, rests his head in the crook of her neck.

“You’re a good person, Steve,” she murmurs into his shoulder.

 _Bullshit,_ Steve’s mind whispers traitorously.

She pulls back, adjusts the strap of the bag on her shoulder. As Steve straightens up, he sees a figure over her shoulder, watching them from the school steps. Tall and blonde. Billy Hargrove.

He swallows.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Nancy says firmly, one hand still holding onto his arm. “I- we can still be friends.”

She pauses a moment as if waiting for him to say something, to acknowledge her words or agree. Maybe to see a hint of the old Steve – the one that followed her around with adoring smiles, that swept her off her feet and tried to be the perfect boyfriend. Instead, he watches her silently, unable to say something because if he does, he thinks he’s going to explode.

Nancy huffs a little and turns, walks away, already drifting away from him again and he did this, he’s pushed her away but it still fucking hurts. He’s not sure it’ll ever stop. He watches her go for a few moments, hears the school bell ring the end of lunch, and when he blinks, Billy Hargrove is still watching him.

He’s leaning against the wall, curls blowing in the breeze, arms crossed over his chest. It should be a relaxing posture but somehow it screams danger. It’s hard to tell at this distance, but it looks like he’s smirking.

 _Monster,_ his mind says. His sucks a deep breath, the air is his chest suddenly gone, closes his eyes as he tries to remember how to breath normally.

When he opens them, Billy is gone.

“Fuck,” he breathes to himself. Finishes his cigarette, packs away the rest of his uneaten lunch and gets into the driver’s seat. His heart is pounding, adrenaline in his veins and the half-healed cut on his scalp throbbing with phantom pain.

Slowly, he pulls out of the parking lot and eases onto the road, heading for who knows where.

There will come a day when he has to acknowledge everything that’s happened, when he’ll have to deal with the shakes that take him in the night, the episodes he has in the day, the way his whole life has changed.

A day when he has to deal with his monsters.

But it’s not today.


End file.
